(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, Steve Adubato here, and more importantly, welcome Dr. Zahava Friedman, who is Assistant Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy at Kean University, one of our higher ed partners.

Doctor, good to have you with us.

- Thank you for having me today.

- Help us understand and define, if you will, occupational therapy, please.

- Sure, so occupational therapy is holistic science and therapy.

We serve people from cradle to grave, so as young as newborns and all the way till the end of life.

And we support and collaborate with them to complete whatever their daily activities are.

For a child, that might look like play.

For an adult, it might look like work, and for an older adult it might look like caring for themselves.

- (hums) There's an initiative that you're involved in called Raising Families.

What is the Raising Families Initiative and why is it so important?

- So, thank you for asking.

This is a project that's near and dear to me.

Raising Families is a grant-funded project, funded by the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey.

It takes place within our occupational therapy clinic on campus, and it's a collaboration between four departments.

So I represent myself, the Department of Occupational Therapy, together with Kelly Sullivan, who's the director of the clinic.

I represent the Department of Physical Therapy.

So John Lee was the faculty member there.

Carrie Giardano from the Department of Advanced Studies in Psychology.

And in addition, I have colleagues from the speech therapy department.

These four departments came together to write a grant to serve specifically children and families who struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So what we saw during the pandemic is parents were at home for long periods of time together with their young children.

And what was different from any other time in history is that these kids were now isolated from other kids their age.

They couldn't go to the park, they couldn't go to the pharmacy or outdoors, and the parents at this very vulnerable moment within their lives also didn't have access to each other.

So we saw a lot of loneliness.

We saw a lot of parent struggle and child struggle.

- Let's talk about that.

What exactly is needed?

You're describing the long-term implications of COVID on families, on parents, on children.

What are the most pressing needs that those children and those families have, please?

- That's a great question.

So the project serves what we see as the highest areas of needs.

So first of all, the children, we saw a tremendous amount of developmental lag, falling behind on milestones above and beyond what I had seen.

I was in school-based practice for 14 years, and I had never seen this amount of delay across many children, even who were typically developing- - I'm sorry for interrupting, Doctor.

I'm sorry for interrupting, give us an example of delay.

A delay of what?

- Yeah, so delay might mean that if a child who is one years old should be walking by that age range, they might be 15 months, 16 months, 18 months or two years, and not yet walking.

A child should be speaking the name of their mother, mama, dada.

They wouldn't show words at the time period where they're meant to show that.

And these milestones were either not appearing at all, so the children were not showing skill, or they were showing up like a year or two late, which has been unheard of in a typically developing population.

You might see it with children who have diagnoses, but we were seeing it across the population after COVID.

- It's interesting, you're a mom of five, correct?

- Yeah.

- I believe age five to up to 17 or 18, something like that.

- You got it.

- How much of this work is personal for you?

- Incredibly personal.

So during COVID, I had four children.

My four older children were in elementary school, and I basically had to set up a little red schoolhouse in my home because all of them were home from school.

And I saw, as a mother, the struggle.

I was an OT, I had worked for over a decade with children, but even I struggled with just keeping my kids engaged and busy and developing.

And then I imagined putting myself in the shoes of every other mother in America, some of whom were not as well equipped as I was to serve the needs of their children.

And what is interesting is my youngest, at that point was two, and he struggled the most.

So that drove this project for me because imagine someone who had worked with children for so many years professionally struggling with their child at home.

I'm thinking to put myself in the shoes of all these mothers with really young children, without the experience, and then needing to serve the needs of those children.

And just the loneliness and despair and this project aims to serve that segment of young parents in our county area.

- Talk to us, if you could, Dr. Friedman, about the mental health.

I know the Healthcare Foundation cares deeply about mental health.

We've done many programs in that regard.

However, the exacerbating of mental health issues and challenges for children, parents, families overall, but individuals who are part of those families.

What is our sense, what is your sense, an your colleagues in the field of occupational therapy as it relates to the mental health, the exacerbating of mental health problems and challenges vis-a-vis COVID?

Is it too soon?

- No, it's not too soon.

And I don't know if it will ever be too late.

So I'm not an expert, professionally, in multi-generational trauma.

I can speak to my personal family experience of that.

But what we have seen, and what I have read across many fields of literature is that the COVID-19 trauma was unique in that it was worldwide.

So you never see before something that impacts almost every population across the globe.

And it was intergenerational.

So from babies to older adults to parents, everyone was affected by the stay at home order.

Everyone was incredibly isolated.

And I think this prolonged isolation will have effects for years to come.

So, like I said, it's never too early to support people, but we might see effects in these children moving on, into elementary school and high school through the lag that they experienced as young children and the traumas of their families.

With mental health impacts, I would say it really can't be underestimated.

We know that it lives in the body and in the lives of anyone who has experienced that loneliness from COVID.

- We're talking depression, we're talking anxiety.

And is isolation in itself... That's not a mental health issue, but being isolated and feeling isolated contributes to, and I dare I use the word again, exacerbates issues of depression.

Is that too simplistic an explanation, doctor?

- No, no, it's not too simplistic.

I think it's one example of the system-wide effects that we're seeing.

So basically COVID revealed the cracks.

COVID revealed the fractures.

So across the population, being in socioeconomic factors or in developmental factors, which is my particular area of study, so what we see is people who were vulnerable became more vulnerable.

People who had resilience built up that resilience.

And if you're serving a population with a socioeconomic status which is challenged, those children anyway struggle to access healthcare practitioners.

But in COVID, they experienced greater challenges.

Children- - Worse.

- Exactly, worse challenges or greater challenges, however the nomenclature.

But it's the same thing with mental health and depression.

There were certain people who may have proclivities who had other experiences, but COVID revealed the cracks and made them more vulnerable to these things.

That's my perception of it.

- Well, your perception matters, doctor.

So parents watching right now, and they say, "Listen, I hear about this Raising Families Initiative going on at Kean University, along with other, not just your department as you described earlier, other departments and a very integrated approach.

I want to get involved, I want to learn more.

How can they do that?

- So we sent out... We did a major recruitment push in June and then again in September.

We have one cohort that completed, already in June, 12 weeks of this programming.

We have another cohort underway.

We sent out to- - How big is the cohort?

- So we take between 10 and 15 families, which means caregiver plus child dyad.

But we do accept families with multiple children.

So it's nice.

If you have our inclusion criteria as a child born just before during the pandemic, so if you have a child, any child born between 2018 and 2021, we sent out recruitment to early intervention.

We sent out to many of our partner offices across the Newark and Essex County and Union County areas to recruit these families.

I sent out to everyone I knew, put it on social media.

All my faculty partners and clinicians also went with a major recruitment push.

And if you have one child that falls within that age range and you're available for those 12 dates, we have accepted the whole family.

Sometimes they'll bring an older sibling to support that child and the parent comes and stays.

So it's a nice opportunity to come for free services, interprofessional services at a university setting, and get really an influx for yourself and for your child.

- Dr. Friedman, I wanna thank you very much for joining us, we appreciate it.

- Thank you, Steve, it's been my pleasure.

- You got it.

Stay with us, folks, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The New Jersey Education Association.

Johnson & Johnson.

The North Ward Center.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

PSC.

And by New Jersey’s Clean Energy program.

Promotional support provided by NJ.Com.

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